GOG.com, the DRM-free PC game store will begin offering games for the Linux operating system starting this fall.
The company says it has been working on Linux support for some time, with Mint and Ubuntu getting the "good old games."
Reads the press release:
Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox One will launch in 26 new nations in September, including the key market of Japan.
The full list includes Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the UAE.
"We'll have much more to share at a local level towards the end of April, so stay tuned," adds Xbox boss Larry Hryb.
Microsoft will need a strong launch in the international nations if it wants to bridge the sales gap between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. Sony has sold over 6.1 million units since launch, while Microsoft has only sold 3.7 million units of the more expensive console.
Online DRM-free PC game store Good Old Games (GOG) has started their annual "Luck of the Irish" sale, dropping the price of 25 games by up to 90 percent.
The sale, which started today for St. Patrick's Day, will conclude on March 21st.
All the games are priced between $2 and $4, and the most popular as of writing are Alan Wake, Hotline Miami, Fez and Deponia, all of which are $2 or $3.
To be able to take advantage of the sale you will need to pick 5 games and if you choose "Pot of Gold" for an extra $2 the company will include a game not included in the standard list at random.
If you choose to buy all the game available, the price is $65, 83 percent off the retail price of $379.75.
Check the sale here.
According to a new book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane entitled "Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs," Apple founder Steve Jobs reportedly told his top executives that HDTVs were a terrible idea due to razor thin margins and incredibly infrequent user upgrades.
Jobs made the comments at a 2010 meeting with his "Top 100" employees, about a year before his death.
During the meeting, Jobs was asked if the company was planning on joining the saturated HDTV market, moving beyond their 'hobby' Apple TV set-top streamer. Jobs responded bluntly, "no" and then continued on to say "TV is a terrible business. They don't turn over and the margins suck."
The tech visionary's alleged answers are in complete contrast with what Jobs told his authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson, as the author wrote the "Steve Jobs" biography in 2011. Jobs said in the biography that Apple had "cracked" the code for HDTV, and that the device would be advanced and sync with all of your other iGadgets.
Over the weekend we reported that Nokia happily boasted about 1 million pre-orders of their new Android-based X smartphone.
It turns out that number is extremely misleading. LiveSide has reported that the number came via retailer JD.com, and that pre-orders in China do not require registration or any money down, meaning anyone with an Internet connection can "pre-order."
In addition, the device was part of a contest where anyone who "pre-orders" can win a Nokia X at launch, so the inflated number was likely even more inflated.
Finally, anyone could "pre-order" one of each of the 4 available colors, meaning real pre-order interest could have been closer to the 100,000 range.
IBM has confirmed that it has not given up any client data to the government, and will challenge any orders to do so in the future.
The company wrote a large blog post, specifically related to how IBM handles customer data, and how it deals with government requests for such data.
Says Big Blue (Full Letter):
-IBM has not provided client data to the National Security Agency (NSA) or any other government agency under the program known as PRISM.
-IBM has not provided client data to the NSA or any other government agency under any surveillance program involving the bulk collection of content or metadata.
-IBM has not provided client data stored outside the United States to the U.S. government under a national security order, such as a FISA order or a National Security Letter.
-IBM does not put "backdoors" in its products for the NSA or any other government agency, nor does IBM provide software source code or encryption keys to the NSA or any other government agency for the purpose of accessing client data.
-IBM has and will continue to comply with the local laws, including data privacy laws, in all countries in which it operates.
The popular music streaming service Rdio has confirmed their acquisition of Indian-based Dhingana, entering the nation for the first time.
Dhingana had shut down its operations in February, after India's largest label, T-Series, did not renew its contract with the streaming service.
Rdio is supposedly paying less for the company than it had raised in startup funding, giving the company a cheap investment and entry into India. Dhingana founders Snehal Shinde and Swapnil Shinde will join Rdio and lead the company's efforts in India and other emerging markets.
In addition, Rdio will also get existing music label contracts, although as previously noted, the biggest label in the nation had already pulled support.
Rdio is currently available in the US, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Spain, Portugal, United Kingdom, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Belgium, Mexico, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Colombia, Chile, Czech Republic, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Ireland, Italy, France, Latvia, Austria and South Africa. The company charges $9.99 per month for unlimited music streaming.
Last year, Time Warner Cable began offering a data usage cap for some small markets, testing the waters with a voluntary option they call "Essentials."
Users that opt in for Essentials originally got a $5 discount off their bill, but were capped at 5GB per month with $1 per GB overage. Hardly a good deal. TWC changed the offer recently, giving an $8 discount for the 5GB cap, or $5 off for a 30GB cap.
The plans have not seen any traction, however, admits Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus. The number of subscribers that have opted-in is "in the thousands," says the CEO, a fraction of the company's nearly 13 million broadband customers.
Of course, the company is still pursuing the caps, or what it calls "creative pricing." The company continues to introduce other fees, including modem rental fees that continue to increase, and a new "broadband tax."
Sprint has unveiled a few new prepaid plans for its smartphone users, including one with no data for subscribers who may always have access to Wi-Fi.
The struggling carrier has seen success in the past with its prepaid offerings, under the Sprint As You Go brand, as well as the independent Virgin Mobile USA and Boost Mobile brands.
Unceremoniously named "Sprint Prepaid," the new service will replace As You Go moving forward. At launch, Sprint will offer Spark (faster LTE)-enabled Samsung Galaxy 4 Mini, the Galaxy S3, the Moto G and the iPhone 4S.
The new no-data plan costs $45 per month and comes with unlimited text and voice, but gives you no 2G/3G/4G cellular data. The second option is $60 per month and includes 2.5GB of unlimited data and then throttled speeds afterwards. Strangely, videos will be throttled to 3G speeds when using the plan.
Apple has created a new section in the App Store for the group among us that loves to take selfies.
Snapchat is the featured app but there are 12 in total in the new section.
Included in the group are "Front Flash," which helps with low-light selfies, Facetune for editing your shots, and Shots of Me, the Justin Bieber-backed selfie direct message app.
Apple has put the temporary section front in center in its App Store for mobile and for desktops.
The full list:
Picr
Frontback
Everyday
Snapchat
Samba
Close-up
Selfie cam
Front Flash
Facetune
SnapDash
1 Second Everyday
Shots/Shots of Me
The Twitter of China, Sina Weibo, will file for its IPO in the U.S., looking to take advantage of a strong stock market, especially for social media and technology companies.
Weibo will raise $500 million via the offering, and will likely become one of the largest public Chinese companies on the U.S. exchanges.
Of note, the company did warn in its IPO filing that there could be uncertainty from Chinese government regulation that would affect traffic. For example, a new regulation in the nation states that any Internet user that makes "or shares information considered defamatory or false could face up to three years' jail time in China."
"The implementation of this newly promulgated judicial interpretation may have a significant and adverse effect on the traffic of our platform and discourage the creation of user generated content," the company wrote in its filing. Additionally, the government could intervene in its encryption tools and software, with the Chinese government requiring all "cipher code products" to be registered with them, adds Weibo.
Weibo has seen strong growth, with revenue growing to $188.3 million in 2013 compared to $65.9 million in 2012. Net losses have also been falling, with profitably expected next year. Daily usership grew 36 percent to 61.4 million in 2013, adds the company.
Nokia has proudly boasted that their new X Android smartphone has already reached 1 million units pre-ordered in China.
The device goes on sale in the nation on March 25th, and pre-orders began on the 11th.
Nokia's X, which will sell for just 89 euros, has a 4-inch IPS LCD, 800 x 480 resolution, 512MB RAM, a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon, 4GB internal storage, a 3MP camera with no autofocus, a microSD slot and no LTE support. The device runs on a custom Android 4.1, one that strips away Google's applications and services and replaces it with Nokia and Microsoft's own.
On the software end, despite being Android the phones look nothing like Android. Instead, Nokia has built a poor man's Windows Phone, with tiles rather an app drawer, and the tile sizes can be adjusted for the apps you want to take more screen real estate. Some tiles are "live" like the calendar and weather, but they won't work as well as Android's widgets. Nokia has added its "Fastlane" stream which can be accessed by swiping across the screen. It will show contacts, recent photos, app notifications and more in one place.
Mozilla has confirmed that its Metro version of Firefox had such tiny adoption that it will be discontinuing support for the specialized browser.
Instead, the company will stick to its much more popular "desktop" AKA the standard version of the software, which remains the second most popular browser behind Internet Explorer.
Mozilla had been working on the Metro-based browser for over two years, trying to give Windows 8 users a native alternative to Internet Explorer. Firefox for Windows 8 had such little interest, the company says it never had more than 1000 active users.
"As the team built and tested and refined the product, we've been watching Metro's adoption. From what we can see, it's pretty flat," Johnathan Nightingale, vice president of Firefox, added. "On any given day, we have, for instance, millions of people testing pre-release versions of Firefox desktop, but we've never seen more than 1,000 active daily users in the Metro environment. When I talk about the need to pick our battles, this feels like a bad one to pick: significant investment and low impact."
DVDFab, the once popular DVD ripping software company, will be completely wiped off the map by a new court ruling.
New York federal court Judge Vernon Broderick ruled in favor of the AACS-LA, a group that includes behemoths Disney, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Warner Bros., IBM, Toshiba and Sony. AACS is the DRM used on DVDs and Blu-ray media, an encryption that has been cracked since 2006.
DVDFab, one of the more popular DVD ripping software, was sued by the AACS-LA, with accusations that it violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention clauses in relation to DVD encryption. "The DVDFab Group openly touts these illegal circumvention attributes of the DVDFab Software on the DVDFab Websites, advertising that, among other things, its software products 'remove all Blu-ray copy protections,' and 'can remove ... all known AACS copy protections'," AACS wrote in the initial complaint.
Just hours after the founders of the controversial movie streaming application Popcorn Time announced they were shutting it down, it appears the popular app will be making a quick comeback.
The group behind YTS (YIFY) will purportedly take over Popcorn Time, immediately, according to Torrentfreak.
After a week of mainstream articles brought the app to the forefront of attention, it became clear that Popcorn Time was quickly becoming the "Netflix of piracy" (as dubbed my multiple sites). Not all of the attention was good, however, and the Popcorn Time team stepped away with a long blog post last night: "Our experiment has put us at the doors of endless debates about piracy and copyright, legal threats and the shady machinery that makes us feel in danger for doing what we love. And that's not a battle we want a place in."
Not all is lost, however. YTS (formerly known as the scene group YIFY-Torrents) has picked up the software: "The YTS team will now be picking up the Popcorn Time project and continuing on like previously. We are in a better position copyright wise as for us, because it's build on our API, it's as if we have built another interface to our website. We are no worse off managing the project than we would be just supplying the movies.
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